Home › The Principles of Cookery › Skate, Fried
Skate, Fried
Cut the skate into square pieces; let these lie for an hour in cold water with a little vinegar or lemon-juice, a sprig of parsley, and a few peppercorns, drain, dry, and flour them, dip them in egg and bread-crumbs, and fry them in hot dripping till they are lightly browned. Send brown sauce, tomato, piquant, or caper sauce to table with them. Time, eight to ten minutes, according to thickness. If skate is too much done it is spoiled.
A straightforward crumbed fry, and the last line of the original is the whole point: skate turns from silky to cottony in the space of a minute or two. Everything else is detail.
- Buy it rightSkate is usually sold as trimmed wings, skinned, in a range of sizes; a common shop wing runs somewhere around half a pound to three-quarters. It should smell of the sea and nothing else; a whiff of ammonia means the urea in the flesh has broken down and the fish is past use. Older sources recommend hanging skate a day before cooking; on a fresh wing there is little to gain by waiting.
- The acid soakThe hour in cold water with vinegar or lemon firms the flesh and rinses off surface slime. Twenty to thirty minutes is enough with a fresh wing. Dry the pieces thoroughly or the flour will slide off.
- Cutting"Square pieces" means cutting the wing down into portions of roughly a hand's width, through the fan of soft cartilage, keeping the pieces of similar thickness so they finish together.
- DrippingBeef dripping, the standard frying fat of the period. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point does the same job; clarified butter browns the crumbs beautifully but needs closer watching. Depth of about half an inch, at 350-360F.
- TimingEight to ten minutes suits a thick wing shallow-fried over moderate heat. Thin tail-end pieces need four or five. The flesh is done when it lifts cleanly off the cartilage in strands; past that it tightens and goes fibrous, which is exactly what the last sentence warns against.
- The saucesPiquant sauce is a brown sauce sharpened with vinegar, shallot and chopped gherkin. Caper sauce could be either the brown version or the white one more familiar with mutton; the recipe does not say. Black butter with capers and a splash of vinegar, the classic French treatment, suits fried skate as well as poached.
- YieldTwo good wings, cut up, will serve two or three as a main course. Serve immediately; crumbed skate does not hold.
Skate was cheap fish in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, common on the barrows and in the fried-fish shops, and Cassell's treats it as a household staple rather than anything grand. Its odd chemistry made a reputation for it: rays and sharks carry urea in their flesh as an osmotic regulator, and as it decays that urea becomes ammonia, which is why stale skate announces itself so unmistakably. The vinegar or lemon in the soaking water here goes unexplained in the recipe itself, and such small acid treatments, scattered through nineteenth-century fish cookery, served several purposes. The insistence on brown, tomato, piquant or caper sauce, all of them sharp or savoury rather than creamy, reflects the same instinct: skate is a fish that likes something acid alongside it.